Performance of SOAP vs. XML-RPC or REST

Question

The arguments about the simplicity of solutions using XML-RPC or REST are easy to understand and hard to argue with.

I have often also heard arguments that the incre

Answer 1

SOAP is definitely slower. Payloads are significantly larger which are slower to assemble, transport, parse, validate and process.

Answer 2

I don't know of any answer to the benchmarking question, however, what I do know about the SOAP format is yes, it does have overhead, but that overhead does not increase per request: if you have one element sent to the web service, you have overhead + one element construction, and if you have 1000 elements sent to the web service, you have overhead + 1000 element construction. The overhead occurs as the XML request is formatted for the particular operation, but every individual argument element in the request is formatted the same.

If you stick to repeatable, short bursts of data (say, 500 elements), the speed should be acceptible.